I’ve spent a lot of time the last few days reading about neo-colonialism. 

We talk a lot – in school, in history, as a society – about colonialism: the French in the Caribbean, the British in India, the scramble for Africa, the list goes on and on. Colonialism was a harmful practice, colonialism was a system that took advantage of developing countries, colonialism destroyed cultures and exploited natural resources and wealth and manpower and created a whole world of harm that we still haven’t recovered from.

But when it comes to neocolonialism, that conversation shifts for some odd reason. 

Now, by definition, neocolonialism is “the control of less-developed countries by developed countries through indirect means.” It’s a term that’s been used since the end of World War II, according to Britannica. Yet, to this day – beyond history classes, the idea of neo-colonialism is rarely explored.

On the rare occasion that conflicts and civil wars in Africa are discussed, a good portion of the time they’re discussed in the context of the scramble for Africa, the haphazard drawing of borders that left no regard for cultural and historical tensions, and the sucking dry of natural resources in the continent. Yet rarely when we talk about conflicts in the Middle East or South America do we talk about the effects of neocolonialism in creating the context for that instability and violence.

Looking purely at U.S government intervention on the basis of alleged American economic interest, we can see countless instances – post World War II – where the government justified the destruction of a democratic or otherwise domestically beneficial government to see the rise of an authoritarian one, solely for American benefit (think the deposing of democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán to benefit the United Fruit Company, or the 1953 coup in Iran to gain access to the Middle Eastern nation’s oil deposits).

Yet, we rarely talk about these instances – American or otherwise.

Now, we’re staring down the barrel at a blatant act of neocolonialism, if it can even be called such a subtle term. The recent events in Venezuela – the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims that the U.S. is now in charge of the nation and that Venezuela will turn over up to 50 million barrels of oil – are just the latest in a historical trend that we, as a society, seem keen on ignoring (interestingly, Venezuela’s oil industry is nationalized – the exact move that helped instigate the CIA-sponsored coup in Iran in 1953). 

Our habit of ignoring the ever-growing exploitative actions of developed nations must come to an end, if we are determined to truly grow from the scars of colonialism. But more than that, it’s time we recognize the modern impacts of neocolonialism and acknowledge that there’s More to the Story than seen at first glance when it comes to conflicts and instability in developing countries worldwide.